Another EMAIL

Dear Councilman Koretz,

I am writing concerning your stance on food trucks. Specifically, this is a reply to your position that food trucks, being mobile, constitute “unfair competition” for stationary restaurants. Your statement was made in reply to the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association (MFVA), which plans to open a permanent food truck lot on 3rd street. Above all else, I seek clarification.

If the food trucks’ main advantage over stationary restaurants is their mobility, how will keeping them in a permanent lot make this condition worse? That is, unless the lot is itself mobile? Is this your position, Councilman? That some variety of levitating– possibly time-traveling– lot, when outfitted with food trucks, may hurt the profit margins of poor, non-ambulatory restaurants, restaurants that are forced to obey the rules of spatiotemporal relation? If this is your concern, please say so outright. As a resident of Los Angeles, I believe it is my right to know whether or not I must protect my family from lots, intersections, or any other allegedly-fixed location that may come to life.

Now that I look at your quote again, I see that you merely said you were “not thrilled” with the idea of these food trucks occupying a lot on 3rd. In this case, I still need clarification. Granted, the sole purpose of any private business should be to thrill you and you alone, Councilman Koretz, but why does this not thrill you? Just before that, you said, “There have been problems with these trucks popping up in front of businesses and people’s homes.” I will not ask you what these problems are, as we have all heard the stories. I cannot remember the last time I turned on the evening news without hearing yet another report of a household, under siege by Frytruck, or Coolhaus, or especially NomNom, forced to eat this inexpensive, gourmet, uniquely Angelino fare. I have been affected by this plight personally, as my grandmother was once pelted with kimchi and Korean short rib when she refused to follow a certain food truck on Twitter.

I will ask, however, why you do not consider this lot a solution to the scourge of roving gangs of food trucks. If these trucks are contained in a lot, we might more easily monitor them. We could station police, even the National Guard, nearby. The only reason against this lot is, again, if the lot is itself more dangerous than the trucks. Again, the only reasonable conclusion is that the lot is mobile, possibly time-traveling, and almost certainly haunted. Is this what you’re hiding, Councilman? The people must know.

As a side note, I find it commendable that, rather than wipe out the food trucks or the cursed lot altogether, you see this as an opportunity to feed workers at construction sites, men and women for whom, as you put it, “it’s difficult… to have access to other food.” While relegating these fascinating cultural institutions to construction sites may be akin to pushing the doomsday clock back a scant ten minutes, it is clear that something must be done about the sorry state of nutrition at Los Angeles construction sites. I for one am tired of finding dead construction workers every time we have a hard rain. It’s making us, as a city, look bad. You know?